Holding On To Hope For Beagle 2

slasher999 writes "Scientists are still keeping their hopes up that they will be able to revive Beagle via the Mars Express mothership on 4 January. On that date the ship will be in the correct orbit and may then be able to revive the lander. Current theroies as to what may have gone wrong include the possibility that the landers on-board clock is incorrect and that the lander has been transmitting at incorrect times. Funny, I thought I heard that as of yesterday the batteries on the lander would have been depleted unless the lander had received an order to recharge its batteries."

Comments

Re:Nigerian scam anyone

[Sivar]

The unit conversion was a mistake of JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratories), a part of NASA that works strictly on unmanned spacecraft.
The Beagle II is a product of the ESA. They are quite different.
While I agree that the conversion was a silly mistake to make, you really have to appreciate how staggeringly complex the undertaking of an unmanned (or manned, in fact) space flight can be. I have three relatives that work for JPL, none of which were on the team that made the error, but they all share the shame. After seeing a small part of what is involved from them, I:
1) Am glad that I do not work for NASA, and
2) Am frankly mystified that, seeing as how we are all human, any successful automated probe missions have been accomplished at all. There is just so much that has to be done *perfectly* to have any hope of even getting off the earth, let alone circling planets at precisely calculated trajectories to gather a specific "amount" of inertia to be able to get to a specific spot over a specific planet so as to be able to exercise a specific number of steps at the exact correct time in the correct order.
Complexity-wise, it is not unlike having to build a mature mission-critical operating system in five years, which has no significant bugs and whose problems are often more difficult to solve.

While it is sometimes fun to make fun of the mistakes of others, I can do no less than stand in awe of how much NASA and the ESA get accomplished with what they have. The ESA in particular, if you compare the Beagle's budget to that of, say, the Galileo project.